April 2009

April 08, 2009

Today Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg posted How Many Friends Can You Have? as a followup to her Ad Age Digital Conference keynote. Based on some research by their Data Team she points out the difference between a network of confirmed ties (all friends) and active networks (friends who communicate with each other) -- and argues the value of advertising within communication streams.

All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends.

Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort
of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had
had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information
between two parties.

One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated.

Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement,
we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed
story or visited their profile more than twice.

Putting aside all friends, they graphed the connectivity by modality:A long time ago I theorized different kinds of active networks for the modes people used weblogs before in The Ecosystem of Networks. I hypothesized that One-way Communication would have greater reach, which makes sense for weblogs. But with the privacy constraints of Facebook this is far less possible than, say, Twitter.

Now, I don't have a data team, but it would be very interesting to see the distribution of people and network size in Twitter for both confirmed ties and unconfirmed ties by reciprocal (@replies), one-way and maintained (RT). The networks and modalities within them are different -- but the difference of public-by-default should be significant.

If you're wondering whether talk of "Twitter in the enterprise" is an overblown fad or an opportunity you need to understand now, this webinar is for you.

Webinar 2: Twitterprise Use Cases & Case Studies
April 23, 9am PDT

The second webinar builds upon the first. Join this free webinar to get specifics on how companies are using social messaging and the value it creates for them. We'll explore general use cases of social messaging technology, and a Socialtext customer will present how they are using Socialtext's microsharing technology, Socialtext Signals.

Webinar 3: Twitterprise Adoption & AchievementMay 7, 9am PDT

The third webinar gets practical about how to foster adoption for "Twitter-like" microsharing technologies in the enterprise. In this webinar you will learn how to foster adoption in a way that directs it towards a business goal. We'll share lessons learned for implementing social messaging and for setting business goals for social messaging that deliver results.